Samsung, Apple, Google Big Q2 Winners in U.S. Smartphone Market

There wasn't a lot of market share shaking going on as Big Three retain their solid positions in the device and platform categories, according to comScore.

There may have been a lot of jostling among the major mobile players in the second quarter of 2012 but it didn't result in much shifting in the U.S. markets for smartphones and smartphone platforms, according to comScore.

The research firm on Monday released its comScore MobiLens report for the three months ending in May, revealing that not only wasn't there any swapping of spots among the market share leaders, but only Apple increased its share by more than 1 percent.

Samsung remains the top handset manufacturer in the U.S. with a 25.7 percent share of the market, according to a comScore MobiLens survey of more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers. That's up just a smidge from the 25.6 percent share the South Korean tech giant enjoyed from December through February.

The total U.S. market includes some 234 million Americans age 13 and older who are mobile device subscribers, the research firm said.

LG Electronics followed Samsung with 19.4 percent of the handset market, down 0.3 percent from its share for the previous three months, while Apple was the biggest gainer with a 1.5 percent increase for its iPhones, resulting in 15 percent market share in the second quarter. Motorola (12 percent) and HTC (6.1 percent) rounded out the top five, each dipping less than 1 percent in terms of market share from the previous period, according to comScore.

Looking at mobile platforms, Google's Android remained the market leader and again owned better than half the U.S. market. In the three months ending in May, Google's OS clocked in with a 50.9 percent share, up from 50.1 percent in the December through February period.

Apple's iOS retained its second-place spot with 31.9 percent of the U.S. marketa 1.7 percent market share gain, making Apple the only company to have a greater than 1 percent market share gain in either the smartphone device or smartphone platform categories.

Research in Motion, however, was the only firm to see its market share shift by as much as 2 percent in the second quarter. Unfortunately for the beleaguered company, RIM's 11.4 percent share of the U.S. smartphone OS market was down from the 13.4 percent share it had in the previous period.

Rounding out the top five smartphone OS vendors from March through May were Microsoft (4 percent) and Symbian (1.1 percent). Microsoft's Windows Phone had an 0.1 percent sequential share gain in the quarter while Symbian's dropped by 0.4 percent.

Meanwhile, Net Applications released its data on tablet platform market share in June. Apple's iOS had a 65.3 percent share of that market for the just-concluded month while Google's Android clocked in at 19.7 percentrepresenting yearly highs for both operating systems.

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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